Among Suetonius’ apocryphal stories in The Lives of the Caesars (121c. CE) is Emperor Caligula’s three-mile bridge across the Bay of Naples from Baiae to Puteoli. It’s the kind of folly you associate with Caligula in one of his less savage moods, and the idea of it appealed to many who enjoyed Seutonius’s narrative. Horace alludes to it in “Sic Te Diva Potens Cypri” (23BCE), an ode that is an homage to Virgil, translated often but notably by John Dryden (1695), later retold by Robert Louis Stevenson in Æs Triplex [Triple Brass] (1891). The bridge is the butt of a sardonic joke in Maurice Baring’s one-act drama Caligula’s Picnic (1911).
The best of the lot is Turner’s painting Caligula’s Palace and Bridge, a sensuous Italian Landscape suffused with hazy atmospheric sunlight Turner alludes to Suetonius, but unlike Stevenson and Baring, he romanticizes the moment, Caligula’s becomes a picturesque ruin were peasants, without any sense of history, picnic on the grass.
See J.M.W. Turner. Caligula’s Palace and Bridge (1831), oil on canvas. London: Tate Britain; J.M.W. Turner. Caligula’s Palace and Bridge (1831), oil on canvas. London: Tate Britain. Engraved by Edward Goodall (1842).